April 14, 2006

I'm stuck. Space Monkey is in Austin without me and Common Sense Mom doesn't want to go out to eat. It's going to be another lonely Friday where I eat by myself and watch a really crappy movie like Transporter 2 that I put on my Netflix Queue when I was drunk.

I would really like for it to not come to that, so any of my Waco readers, if you want to get together, feel free to shoot me an email.

April 13, 2006

Last night had to be one of the most stressful nights I've ever had at work.

I walk in the door and the first thing I hear is that my boss was calling me a "blankety-blank" and wanted my first priority to be the Little League Plus page. So I spent two hours typing up all of the little league stuff that had already been typed and lost to put on the page.

The kicker is, because of that I didn't realize that the agate wire was down until fairly late at night. And tech services didn't exactly fix the problem and my page suffered because of it. I could find a lot of the stuff on yourap.org, but the other kicker is that everything on my page goes through a translator and looks totally different than how it is originally put on the wire. Trying to do all of that by hand is such a pain in the neck.

Work has become so stressful that I can't go home at the end of the week without suffering a major computer/technical failure of some kind and without a major stress headache blurring my vision on the drive home. It's so stressful that I'm clenching my jaw right now just thinking about last night.

The only thing keeping me from a complete nervous breakdown is the fact that you are all here reading and commenting on this blog, and my delusions that I'm funny and deserve to be on TV.

April 09, 2006

But I don't feel like writing anything tonight. That's what happens when I take Saturday off, I don't want to do anything on Sunday. Here are some things to look forward to this week, when I do feel like it.

"If necessary, I will enforce spending restraint through the exercise of the veto."

Which is extraordinary since he's never vetoed anything. Ever. If you don't take it out and use it, it does rust shut and I think any oppurtunity for him to veto anything in the name of spending restraint is long gone.

What is really interesting, though, is the job report itself. It says 211,000 new jobs in March. That doesn't tell you the whole story: Not every sector recorded job growth in March

Manufacturing
employment declined 5,000 after shrinking 10,000 in February and
transportation industries shed 7,600 jobs last month. But overall
hiring in service businesses grew 202,000 last month after increasing
194,000 in February. Goods-producing industries increased payrolls
overall by 9,000 in March, fewer than the 31,000 new hires in February.

I'm still looking for a think tank or research center that explains exactly what jobs were created and what jobs were lost. If we're moving to a Wal Mart-based economy, then this isn't exactly good news. And I would really like to see real wage growth instead of what we have been seeing.

And stock prices haven't exactly boomed over this news. There is still worry that the Fed will keep hiking interest rates to help keep inflation contained. A rapidly expanding economy with a huge mountain of debt and a housing bubble aren't exactly what makes an economy stable.

During the 2001 recession and its aftermath, many of the president's supporters claimed that he had little effect on the economy. They especially said that when it looked like all his tax cuts did was go to rich people and expand the debt and job growth was slumping. Now he's taking credit fo rhis tax cuts saying they led directly to job growth.

Even that is a bone of contention, since the after-tax income of anyone, including millionaires that got the bulk of the cut has little to do with their business-hiring practices. It probably has little to do with expanded consumption, as well.

No, I think our recovery is simply from the fact that we have an overall great economy because of who is in our workforce. And as we get farther away from the recession, it is going to seem less causal to our continued economic strength. I think it also helps that the Fed cut rates down to a historic low before the recession (1%) and has continued raising them 15-times (another record!) over the course of this presidency to keep inflation and other economic dangers at bay.

While writing this, I have continued the search and foud Job Watch analysis of the 2003 tax cut plan and the documents related.

This whole post might seem disjointed, and that's because I keep interrupting myself to look for some new piece of information. But what you should take away is that job growth is good in the short-term. But what kind of jobs and who is getting them are better indicators. And the long-term health of our economy is more dependent on sound fiscal policy that does not include continued tax cuts. Those tax cuts are still irresponsible and only serve to keep our national debt high and continue the risks of inflation and stagnant wages.

Actually, I spent a good deal of time with my old friend, Baghdad Babe. That's what I'm calling her since she is stationed in Iraq and is just on leave until the 17th. She is also the new Iraqi Bureau Chief for Common Sense News, and she will be giving updates from a soldiers-eye view on the ground when she can. She's also probably going to talk about her dick husband and how big a dick he is, which I'm totally OK with.

But I didn't spend all day with her. I got home around 3 in the afternoon and decided to take a nap. Mexican food and Dos Equis makes me want to sleep, what can I say. I woke up to find all hell had broken loose in the Common Sense House, which apparently isn't an apt moniker. Some of you may remember the drama of December, well, things haven't gotten any more civil.

Frankly, I don't want to go into it right now. I don't think I'm getting any sort of catharsis from writing about it right now. I will say that I feel it is inherantly unfair that all the stress in my life comes from other people. I go to work, I do my blog, I support local business by buying coffee and sandwiches often. Yet, somehow, my life gets turned around very easily because of what other people do. I guess that is the price one pays for having any social interaction.

There is a great injustice there. I'm not a wifebeater. I haven't been arrested for assault. I pay my taxes and support our troops. But I can't even sit in my own house without having to deal with other people's problems and defects. It's... it's silly is what it is.

April 05, 2006

That didn't go very well. I ended up back in bed trying to sleep after such a stressful night at work. I really was close to having a total breakdown. If one of the desks guys hadn't been there to talk and help me out, I probably would have lugged my computer up two flights of stairs and thrown it off the roof.

But I didn't, and other than a wicked stress headache, I'm much more calm today. It's amazing that someone as relaxed and laid-back as myself can get so worked up and stressed out by my computer at work. The combination of a Mac and the DT system we have just is too much for a simple sports clerk to bear sometimes.

I've come up with a novel solution to my problem. I need a member of Congress to simply add a pork project to the next appropriations bill. We're talking $30 thousand in a multi-trillion dollar budget. That's not harmful. This way I can live and blog without being sidetracked by a job and all the stress that comes with it.

I did eat cheese tots tonight, though. Thank you for the PayPal Gypsy.

By the way, that's not me in the picture. I'm too poor to have a digital camera and to have uploaded photos that quickly. It is a random picture I found through Google Images by searching for "cheese tots." It almost looks like the back of my head, though.